Andrew Old’s top blogs of the week 23 April 2018

In this post, my fellow Schools Week blog reviewer Harry Fletcher-Wood explains that if you are stuck up a climbing wall, you don’t need encouragement, you need step-by-step advice on where to put each hand and foot. He uses this analogy to illustrate how breaking tasks down is a useful principle when teaching in the classroom, explains the psychological principles behind this, and gives examples of how to do it.

Despite the title, this post does not contain any appealing recipes to try out. Instead it uses a cookbook format to describe in depressing if acutely observed detail the actual eating habits of the classroom teacher. I shuddered in recognition at descriptions of several disturbing items that can be found in any staffroom, like the “teacher’s iced tea” and the “fridge-aged salad”.

A former psychology teacher now working for the Institute for Teaching, Nick describes how our memories work. The post covers the difference between retrieval strength and storage strength, and the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.

He explains that “information isn’t truly lost when we forget it, but a trace remains which can be potentially strengthened and consolidated”.

The ECDL is the European Computer Driving Licence qualification which has been criticised recently. The post points out the benefits of the qualification to some students, but explains the extent to which it has been used to inflate Progress 8 scores, due to its remarkably high points value. Students who were averaging less than a C in their GCSEs were counted as getting the equivalent of a grade A in this qualification, meaning that some schools only got their positive P8 score because of it.

This post is partly polemical and partly advice on what a good English literature curriculum looks like. The author argues that popular but undemanding books might have a place in primary school and in encouraging reading at home, but that every child deserves to experience great literature.

“We must expose students to the very greatest texts in the literature canon from an early age, so they can become steeped in the very best examples of using language, and fully understand the intertextuality between exceptional books,” he writes.

This post, by a primary school teacher, describes some of the dubious practices schools engage in to “assist” their students during their SATs exams. It describes how some rules are interpreted in curious ways, and sometimes rules are broken.

“The really sad thing about this is that it really is not benefiting the children,” it states.

This controversial article argues that the Education Endowment Fund (EEF) has been wrong to emphasise a broad category of interventions described as “meta-cognition and self-regulation”.

Greg argues that the various teaching activities in this category have relatively little in common, and should not be judged as one and suggests that this shows flaws in the way the EEF researches teaching methods.